Little Aleisha's battle: 'My toddler had breast cancer'

But when Melanie Hunter, 41, heard the devastating diagnosis, it wasn’t her suffering from the disease – it was her three-year-old daughter Aleisha.

‘It was a shock,’ says Melanie, reliving her fear. ‘I had to sit down. I didn’t think a child that young could get breast cancer.’

Melanie first noticed the pea-sized lump on the left side of Aleisha’s chest in December 2008, when she was just two years old.

Doctors initially put it down to an infection of the lymph nodes. But when the painful lump continued to grow, further tests revealed Aleisha had a rare type of breast cancer: juvenile secretory breast carcinoma.

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